2019 Aliy Cam: Episode 6 “The Gamble”

Here is a little “back story” for this video.

I had several race plans for the 2019 Iditarod. But, I decided early on that my most likely course of action was that the team and I would push on from McGrath to Ophir and then to our 24 hour break in Iditarod. Of course plans often change – in life and Iditarod. Honestly, I was very tempted to alter my strategy due to the falling snow and warm temperatures. But, in my head, I really could see it all working out in our favor… if we just pushed through this tough section.

Both the team and I were rejuvenated leaving McGrath. The weather that had come in during the last few hours had certainly dropped a bit of snow on the trail so I was happy to have a rested team. My run time through the mountains and over to Takotna was average, I can’t claim to have made that run faster than anyone else but we certainly did not go slowly. 

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen when I pulled into Takotna since for the last decade that’s where we have spent 24 hours and is basically my home away from home on the Iditarod trail. I wanted to sort this out in my head first so that I gave the impression to my team mates that we were not staying there this year. Once that was done, I was truly ready to commit to mushing all the way to the checkpoint of Iditarod for my 24-hour mandatory rest. And I’ll admit, even now, that I was pretty excited about this somewhat bold move. One small hurdle was actually passing through the checkpoint of Takotna because I had sent quite a lot of supplies, in case I chose to stay in that checkpoint. I needed to sort through all that and send dog jackets, booties and expensive extra gear back to myself in my “Return Bags”. Fortunately, Moira and I had packed the checkpoint bags so that all of that gear was somewhat sorted. All I had to do was take it out of one bag and put it into another. According to race stats I only stayed in Takotna for three minutes.

Our run from Takotna to Ophir proved that the race trail was going to be a “slow go”. The team managed just fine, but we weren’t lighting a fire behind our tails. It took a lot of effort to reach Ophir and I deemed it best to stay in the checkpoint for a short rest prior to continuing. Why do that, instead of camping down the trail farther outside the checkpoint? Well, for one thing, it’s “easier”. All my supplies, water and straw are brought directly to my sled. I could bed down the dogs and feed them quickly and efficiently. The other factor is plain and simple: my dogs enjoy checkpoints. Of course I can make them go thru any checkpoint (and we just had gone thru Takotna.) A mom can make her 7 year old boy walk through ‘Toys are Us’ and not buy anything, but he’s going to leave the store crying. I didn’t want the possibility of crying, sulking or even slight frowns from my dogs. So, we stayed in Ophir for about 2 hours.

Before I left Ophir with 14 rested and relatively happy huskies I distinctly remember Nic Petit asking me “Are you really going to go and break trail?” I’m not sure if he thought I was crazy to do this or whether he didn’t want to let his lead go. He likes leading… so probably the latter.

Once we left Ophir there was no turning back. Our goal was to reach Iditarod and take our 24-hour mandatory there. It was just getting daylight and the snow was certainly coming down. I viewed this as going one of two ways.

1. Of course the first way was that we got out ahead or in this storm and were able to get to Iditarod as most of the snow fell behind us. Even though we were traveling in a blizzard, all the teams that left behind us would deal with even more snowfall and have slower travel times because they would have had to deal with deeper snow.
2. The second was that we went through the worst of it, we broke trail for everyone in the deepest snow, and that all the teams behind us would go faster after the snow had a chance to set up.

I did keep a positive attitude as we seemingly broke trail and went literally four or five miles an hour all morning. That afternoon when the skies cleared, I even got a glimpse of the sun, and I knew that most of the snow had fallen just before we trudged along the trail and on top of us – no more was falling behind us!

Just because you make a gamble and it doesn’t quite pay off you can’t throw all your cards! So when I reached Don’s Cabin, which is still 50 miles from Iditarod, I knew that the dogs and I should take a well-deserved break. When you look at it from a competitive aspect you don’t want your break to be very long in duration, but when you look at it from dog-team management aspect you know you need to give you and your team significant rest. Probably the thing that made this decision to rest for almost four hours easy for me, was the fact that it was so warm that the snow was actually dripping off the roof of the cabin. I knew it wouldn’t be fair to ask the dogs to continue in these warm temperatures. So we took a well deserved break. But… I now knew that we were losing time to the teams behind us.